8/8/2012

I try to keep my posts to this blog to at least a minimal level of scholarly-ness. At the very least I try to avoid doing too many posts on weird Chinese English. Not that there is anything wrong with them, but there is a time and a place for everything. Plus if I start making fun of people’s English then the comments may fill up with odd quotes from things I have written in Chinese.

However…. When I was in Pingyao, Shanxi (which is worth visiting, by the way) I went to the city-god temple. They had a shrine to Zhong Kui, the demon queller, which was not much of a surprise.

The statue is undistinguished, and does not look very old. The sign, however, is great. In English it identifies him as

“Zhong Kui, the popular beliefs of the Han ethnic areas folk,1 is one of the Taoist God solely primarily of Buffy the governance ghosts, evil spirits exorcism of God….”

The Chinese text does not mention Buffy, so I’m guessing this is a Google translate error of some sort.

It is interesting that the more recent signs at Chinese sites treat the Han just like any other ethnic group. [↩]